LINDA TRIPP RETURNS

Do you remember Linda Tripp? She was a Bush 41 administration employee, who kept her Defense Department job into the Clinton administration. She met Monica Lewinsky when Lewinsky was transferred out of the White House to the Defense Department. Tripp then learned details of Lewinsky's sexual activity in the Oval Office, secretly taped Lewinsky's conversations, tried to get a book deal from gossip specialist Lucianne Goldberg, and finally turned over all the dirt she had scraped up to political hack prosecutor Ken Starr.

I hate to remind you of all this. People remember the Clinton scandal. They don't remember the perverse abuses of power that the GOP used to attack Clinton. They don't remember that the Newt launched politically motivated special counsel investigations of Whitewater land deals, the White House travel office, White House requests for personnel files, and Vince Foster's suicide. No crimes had been committed; nothing improper had occurred; all of this was deception.

Clinton was finally impeached and acquitted, for giving deceptive answers to Starr about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. There was no crime to investigate here; consensual sex between adults may be sleazy but it is completely legal. The "crime" Clinton was impeached for was giving misleading answers to an unprincipled, corrupt, right wing hack who was abusing his official authority for GOP political gains.

But let's remember that Linda Tripp played a key role in the attack. Essentially she was a right wing subversive, working from within the Clinton administration to bring it down.

Obama does not have to deal with the nightmare of a corrupt, unprincipled GOP Congress yet. For the sake of this country and the future of the world let's hope he never has to.

But he may need to deal with the problem of right wing partisans infesting federal agencies at high levels.

Do the recent actions of the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service seem a little odd? Have you noticed the Obama Administration announcing one thing - like a drilling permit moratorium - while Interior Department underlings announce something else?

This may be just the normal operation of a large bureaucracy, and a difficulty of coordinating the efforts of thousands of civil service employees.

But there may be more than a few Linda Tripps out there. And the Obama Administration had better beware of the dangers of fanatical subversives working to bring them down.